Test of Blurb.com layflat photobook

I have made a fair amount of photobooks with Blurb.com over the past 11-12 years, I even sold quite a few of them. Some of them are even still for sale (hint hint). Enough of that. Long have I wanted to test the layflat photobook and long have the internet waited. OK, probably not. But it is here! My first layflat photobook, and I used the Blurb Bookwright software, picked out some of my favourite images from my favourite band The Minds of 99 that I have photographed for a few years now. I spent an evening playing with the design and hit upload! Then I waited 4 weeks for this book to get delivered because, anything but the economy shipping from the US to here adds a lot of cost to an already premium book. Finally, it arrived, the internet is excited, I am excited, the movie and the blog post is here. Check the video above to see what it looks like (yes I need my sensor cleaned!). What do I think of the book?

I am blown away by how much I love the layflat. I shoot a lot of center composition pictures and I do a lot of 16:9 or 2:1 crops so my pictures are already perfect for this format. Not one pixel gets lost in this type of book.

It is called layflat for a reason. The reason? It actually really lays flat! As in really flat! Imagine if you printed your book on one long long long piece of paper and just folded it up and glued the pages together. That is roughly how it behaves.

You do get a premium product for your money (I made sure to time my purchase with a Blurb discount campaign). The print quality is top quality, the paper is amazing. And thick! It is like two pages glued together, pages are almost like stiff cardboard.

Instead of the normal book effect where images spread over the gutter really suffer, you get this amazing ‘window’ effect. You open the book, flat, and it is like the book disappears, your eyes filter out the tiny gutter line and it feels and looks incredible.

The layflat is expensive and not for everything, but honestly, for this type of work I am presenting here I am going to have a hard time ordering anything but layflat. Layflat has spoiled me. Damn you, layflat, I cannot afford you every time!

Hi Brett. I don’t know if you need the actual control though. The pages are totally identical in colour and lightness. If they are not in the video that is just my crappy video skills. You could chop the image into 2 parts if you wanted individual control on each page.